Re: China feathered dinosaur & flora re-dated

[Phillip Bigelow <bh162@scn.org>]

To be specific, they are now considered middle Barremian (*mid*-Early
Cretaceous)!

There is more information on _Nature_'s web site (the article is
appearing in this week's _Nature_).

In order to read the commentary, you must sign-up for on-line access to
_Nature_.  (user name and password are needed.  It's easy, and _Nature_
doesn't spam.  It takes about a minute to sign up.).  Unfortunately, not
all _Nature_ articles are available on line for free (in fact,
relatively few are), but it is still worthwhile to get a user-name and
password for access to what is available.


http://www.nature.com/contents.html

Click "This weeks Nature" and scroll down to the "News and Views"
section.  Look for     "Palaeobiology: A refugium for relicts", by Zhexi
Luo.

Next, check out the research article, itself, on-line (yes, it's a
free-bee this week, the whole paper is available!), entitled "Cretaceous
age for the feathered dinosaurs of Liaoning, China" by CARL C. SWISHER
III, YUAN-QING WANG, XIAO-LIN WANG, XING XU & YUAN WANG.  (it's a
"Letters to Nature" article).

Not exactly something to tweek the passions of a the typical dinosaur
fan, but to a geologist and bio-stratigrapher, it's very interesting :-)

As a side note, I came away from the article feeling that this whole
geo-chron. matter could have been resolved years ago.....    :-/

                                             <pb>